Deeplinks Blog posts about DMCA

Imagine a new, disruptive company figured out a way to let hundreds of people watch a single purchased copy of a movie, even though the rightsholders who made that movie objected. The new company charged money for this service, and gave none of it back to the movie's creators. That's exactly the business model that a controversial project at the Web's premier open standards organization seeks to prevent.

Of course, it's also the business model of Netflix, circa 1997, not to mention every prior video rental service relying on the traditional principle that a copyright owner's control ended when they sold a copy of the work.

The World Wide Web Consortium has taken the extraordinary, controversial step of standardizing DRM in the form of something called Encrypted Media Extensions, which will be part of HTML5. Because of laws like the DMCA and its international equivalents, security researchers who reveal flaws in HTML5-compliant browsers will face punishing legal jeopardy. We're worried that this means that critical bugs in the browsers billions of people rely upon will take longer to come to light and are more likely to be exploited in the wild.

Last summer, some of the world's most prominent security researchers told the US Copyright Office that the DMCA kept them from coming hforward with flaws they've discovered.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important ruling last Fall in the long-running “dancing baby” case, affirming that copyright holders must consider whether a use of material is fair before sending a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We welcomed that ruling, but the majority decision also set the bar for enforcing that requirement higher than Congress intended.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will consider adopting a DRM non-aggression covenant at its Advisory Committee meeting in Boston next week. EFF has attended several of these meetings before as a W3C member, always with the intent to persuade the W3C that supporting DRM is a bad idea for the Web, bad for interoperability, and bad for the organization. By even considering Web standards connected with DRM, the W3C has entered an unusually controversial space. Next week's membership meeting will be accompanied by demonstrations organized in Boston by the Free Software Foundation, and other cities where the W3C has a presence.